Ex-and-future child, limbo lamb,
you exchange hope for a backward glance
nibbling a mother-shaped flame.
What fleeced you into such reticence
of being?
You visited the earth but not anymore,
bent beside your matted fleecing.
In the book of naked transports
there is no “remember?”
there is no “let’s…”
The echo resists—
mildly hard of hearing.
You visited the earth but not anymore.
When you did you were natural at bounding.

Elizabeth Metzger’s first collection, The Spirit Papers, won the 2016 Juniper Prize and will be published by University of Massachusetts Press in Winter 2017. Her chapbook The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death is forthcoming from Horsethief Books. Her poetry has recently appeared in The New Yorker, Best New Poets 2015, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She is the Poetry Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal.